About Me

Blog Archive

Search This Blog

Thursday, December 27, 2012

`Future Ancient Tradition'

Readerly
bliss: roaming relatives’ half-remembered shelves, almost without purpose,
trusting in serendipity, knowing you’ll find the volume you want though you don’t
know in advance what it is. The exercise never fails. The Brownings? No.
Kipling? Not now, though Stalkey and Co.
might be fun later in the week. Volume 2 of The
CompleteWorks of O. Henry (Doubleday, 1953)? There’s no Volume 1 in sight, though the
bounty is more than generous -- 173 stories filling 1,692 pages. Guy Davenport
reminds us of what Cesare Pavese said of O. Henry, whom he translated and
deeply admired: “He ended sentences the way no one had ever before ended them,
except Rabelais.” Consider this passage from near the beginning of “Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen”:

“Stuffy
Pete took his seat on the third bench to the right as you enter Union Square
from the east, at the walk opposite the fountain. Every Thanksgiving Day for
nine years he had taken his seat there promptly at 1 o'clock. For every time he
had done so things had happened to him--Charles Dickensy things that swelled
his waistcoat above his heart, and equally on the other side.”

A sly
confident voice, almost trustworthy, Twain-ish, one that knows the rhythms of
stories and paces them with cunning and precision, with a gentlemanly nod to
another master storyteller. Earlier in the day, Stuffy Pete had been waylaid by
the servant of an old lady on Washington Square, who dragged him indoors in an
act of aggressive philanthropy, and fed him a grand meal:

“…Stuffy
Pete was overcharged with the caloric produced by a super-bountiful
dinner, beginning with oysters and ending with plum pudding, and including (it
seemed to him) all the roast turkey and baked potatoes and chicken salad and
squash pie and ice cream in the world. Wherefore he sat, gorged, and gazed upon
the world with after-dinner contempt.”

I was
pre-lunch hungry when I read this, and Stuffy Pete’s repast induced salivation.
In Union Square, Stuffy Pete, already stuffed, waits to meet the Old Gentleman
who for nine years has treated him to another act of involuntary philanthropy –
another sumptuous meal. The narrator tells us his benefactor wishes to create
an “Institution,” as he has no son of his own to carry on the “future
ancient Tradition.”

Stuffy
Pete is full to bursting but doesn’t want to disappoint the old man. Both men
are locked into ritual. In another note, Davenport reports William James was
a devoted fan of O. Henry’s stories (both died in 1910, as did Twain and
Tolstoy – annushorribilis), and may have been influenced by the fiction writer in
his chapter on habit in Principles of
Psychology.

To cut to
the obligatory and very pleasing O.Henry-ending: Stuffy rounds the corner from
the restaurant, “Then he seemed to puff out his rags as an owl puffs out his feathers,
and fell to the sidewalk like a sunstricken horse.” He’s taken
to the hospital where doctors are baffled by his condition. Soon, the Old
Gentleman, Stuffy Pete’s benefactor, arrives and is placed in another bed. One
of the doctors tells a nurse (“whose eyes he liked”):

“That nice
old gentleman over there, now,’ he said, `you wouldn't think that was a case of
almost starvation. Proud old family, I guess. He told me he hadn't eaten a
thing for three days.’”

Irony
applied with a putty knife? Of course. But also a sly satire on charity and the
unintended consequences of good intentions. And in language more tartly demotic
than much of Twain and anything by Damon Runyon. Davenport writes:

“It is not,
however, the plot that the reader who has come to like O. Henry reads him for;
it is the charm of his comic eye, the accuracy of his ear, and, in this day and
age, the rude honesty of his moral sense.”